Tom Watson Quotes

“the railroad owners, who evaded taxes, bought legislatures, and overcharged him with discriminatory rates;”
― C. Vann Woodward, Tom Watson: Agrarian Rebel

“Watson knew that the lien system merely provided the shackles of the farmer’s economic slavery. It was only the machinery of exploitation. How was it that cotton had fallen from a dollar a pound at the close of the War to an average of twenty cents in the ‘seventies, nine cents in the ‘eighties, and seven cents in the ‘nineties—a level below the cost of production—and had stayed there?”
― C. Vann Woodward, Tom Watson: Agrarian Rebel

“A sword may be surrendered with more grace and dignity than a point of view.”
― C. Vann Woodward, Tom Watson: Agrarian Rebel

“Perhaps it was because his hair was a shade too dark that his schoolmates did not call him “Red,” and perhaps it was because of something else. At least four of his schoolmates, now living, agree that he possessed an unusually quick temper and a disposition to attack with waspish fury on small provocation”
― C. Vann Woodward, Tom Watson: Agrarian Rebel

“A sensitive spirit wounded by those who should have nurtured, sees all things in a false color, is proud of its own isolation, magnifies its defects, is unfitted for the intercourse of the world and as far as the necessities will allow retires within itself and imagines that all others are more fortunate, more deserving and more happy.”
― C. Vann Woodward, Tom Watson: Agrarian Rebel